I agree - it looks and works great. To me, it feels like a phone OS designed with the small form-factor in mind, rather than a porting of a "desktop icon" metaphor to a smaller screen. The home screen is designed to expose a number of things you want to do/see without requiring to navigate anywhere or launch an app. Simple things like the way the buttons feel and animate make the experience better. I find it both more enjoyable to use than Android and iPhone, and also snappier (using a Samsung phone, haven't used the Nokia). The main thing it lacks at the moment is the breadth of apps, but it's getting there. My normal phone is Android, but when I'm due for an update I'm likely to switch to WP.

"I don't have a 3D TV, but want one for gaming"

I had a chance to play 3D games at CES, and they were great. Using the shutter glasses or special polarized glasses, it's also possible for two people to see different 2D images on the same display (ie, instead of alternating right/left eye, the glasses alternate person1/person2). This allows PvP gaming on a single TV with each person getting the full-screen experience. Either way, I think the technology is great for gaming.

Even the honor system won't work. Now that the on-line retailers like Amazon and iTunes have a cloud service that stores your purchases, the concept of deleting local copies doesn't work.

Anyone who works regularly with lawyers (as I do, (and I'm a geek (as demonstrated by these nested parens))) will know that it will take nothing short of full strength AI to replace them, lawyer jokes aside. There is so much nuance, subtlety, and tweaking of agreements that a using a simple computerized approach won't work for a substantial portion of what (say) normal corporate law firms do. If we magically move to a machine readable contract language, portions of contract verification might be automated, but certainly not the writing. And good luck getting lawyers to move to such a thing any time soon.

My interpretation is that it's freebase.com but with a different (easier?) API, loose (or absent) semantics, and no starting data.

I have & like the Lowepro Fastpack 350, and I think it will meet your needs. There's a full sized laptop sleeve along the back. The bottom part of the compartment will hold a DSLR+lens and 4 other lenses or 2 lenses+flashes. The camera compartment can be opened from the side, so you can get your camera out without taking the backpack off. There's a side pouch that can be used to carry a tripod (be careful with the mesh) if you add a strap at the top, or you can strap it to the bottom/back. The top compartment is large enough to hold a light jacket + other random stuff (MP3 player, chargers, mouse, grad filters, cleaning gear, filters, etc). Take a look at the pictures on Amazon to get a better sense of the layout.

I visited a local photo store to check out options before ordering this one, which met my needs and was reasonably priced relative to the alternatives.

See his book Emperor's New Mind. Most AI people viewed this skeptically back then, too.

http://www.amazon.com/Emperors-New-Mind-Concerning-Computers/dp/0192861980/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1306449679&sr=8-1

Arduino is great, I've got my own, but it seems like the choice you'd make if you were pursuing hobbyists instead of commercial device manufacturers. Am I wrong?

"This can only mean..."

Spoken like someone with no knowledge of the actual negotiation. Why does Google need the labels to do a dropbox style locker in the first place? They've had Google Docs for a while now. Maybe what it means is they got caught with their pants down due to the Amazon launch, and felt pressure to get something out at I/O faster than they had expected, and when the labels didn't accept every term they offered, they just went without.

Of course a lawsuit may be coming, but the evidence suggests not. Other "dumb" lockers have been around for years. If Google starts using a single copy of a given track to serve everyone (as opposed to uploading each person's file) or does any number of other things that clearly require a license, then they'll be exposed.

Too much hot CO2, right?

There's a really good chance this resulted from automatic claiming tools that make use of things like acoustic fingerprints. YouTube or a filtering partner will have a catalog of Warner tracks that new uploads are checked against. Warner may not even have known about this until it blew up. I'm sure we'll find out soon enough.

Explain this right to take someone else's work, which you have not paid for and have no rights to under the law, regardless of whether they want you to or not? Do you think that we can have a healthy society if the people bringing new creations into the world are forced to share their works at your whim and under your terms? Sure, some of us want to share what we do, because we know it will be reciprocated. But this has to be voluntary under the guidelines of the law.

Just because you can take something does not mean your are entitled to it.